Celloscope Banking Platform is an open architecture and extensible banking services platform which supports and enables a number of key features for a bank under a single platform. The key components of Celloscope Banking Platform are best visualized through the feature and component diagram below.
As depicted key component of Celloscope Banking Platform are:
Celloscope offers a highly secure and robust Agent and Mobile Banking platform to the banking industry, which can be integrated with existing banking infrastructure, mobile and data networks, and payment gateways. It enables a bank’s customers, staffs and agents to access banking services securely and effortlessly using their mobile handset from anywhere, anytime, even while on the go.
Overview
Celloscope Platform is designed to cater to different financial institutions with common as well as unique need. The platform is flexible enough to be used by for-profit and not-for-profit organizations alike. The challenges faced by developing nations when it comes to providing financial services has always been considered during design and implementationphases.
Benefits for Banks
Celloscope’s Banking Platform helps banks increase service penetration, enhance customer loyalty and stickiness, reduce cost of operations and increase revenue. With mobile banking, banks can empower its customers (directly or through agents) to securely access their bank accounts using mobile phones to get information of their accounts like available balance, transactions.
Competitive Advantages
Celloscope Banking Platform certainly will give banks a competitive advantage over other banks offering same kind of services to their clientele. It will allow banks to come to market with new and enhanced banking services in a shorter time frame with a significant cost reduction. In terms of both time to market and delivery cost Celloscope Banking Platform has all the potential.
About
Our Humble Beginnings
Celloscope started with a simple goal: provide financial institutes with a platform toextend their services to far-reaching people,something they cannot do with a brick and mortar model. With that goal, CELLOSCOPE has developed a robust platform aggregating the individual strength of a few good friends.
2009-2010
The story behind CELLOSCOPE started long before the company was formally launched. The six individuals behind CELLOSCOPE, located dispersedlyaround the globe had exchanged ideas and thoughts for many months waiting all along for the time when they all would meet to discuss things in person.
2011-2012
Around two years back, they got that much awaited opportunity to meet in Dhaka to discuss their plans. As usual, they started off with common topics like growing old,getting bored, missing Dhaka, and of course they all laughed out loud over memories of funny old stories. As conversation floated about on that afternoon, before long, it led to exploring possibilities of putting together their collective knowledge to address common needs in Bangladesh and beyond.
2013
With degrees in engineering and having spent most of their professional years in and around technologies, they can easily be labeled as an assembly of typical nerdsand geeks. Surprisingly, this crowd does not fall into that stereotyped category; they still listen to their music, search the night sky for falling stars, and read their fictions.This attribute, above all, gives them the edge over their competitors. They can think outside the realm of technology and relate easily to the need of their clients. This quality coupled with their command over technology gives CELLOSCOPE its unique flavor.
2014-2015
On an individual level, the ideas and expertise they possess were varied, and seemed apparently incoherent. In a nutshell they are:
• Hafiz's company in New York builds complex backend software for Wall Street firms.
• Rusho's company in Dhaka creates feature-rich Android based applications for clients in US.
• Asif's people build sophisticated banking and telecom software for large corporations, here and abroad.
• Rasul is ready to roll up his sleeves once again to deploy his army of agents as he had done earlier in his career.
• Shabbir, the financial wizard among the crowd, is excited about the prospect of growth for the new company.
• Rubayat is full of claims that agent banking can trigger a paradigm shift in the lives of average people in Bangladesh.
Everyone in that meeting put forth some unique proposition, propositions that could complement each other towards achieving a common goal.
At the end, they all wandered: why not put it all under one roof? And, that is exactly what they did. CELLOSCOPE, the company, came into being on that summer afternoon; a company where people with a zealto utilize technology to solve real life issues joined hands.
Celloscope Platform is designed to cater to different financial institutions with common as well as unique need. The platform is flexible enough to be used by for-profit and not-for-profit organizations alike. The challenges faced by developing nations when it comes to providing financial services has always been considered during design and implementationphases.
Some tangible goals that the platform aims to achieve include:
Provide technology and operation support to financial institutions so that financial services are readily available to common people, specially grass root people in rural and urban areas
The technology and operation must be culturally and economically appropriate for Bangladesh context
The technology and operation must be retained and owned by Bangladesh at source level so that cost of operation and support is least in terms of money and time
The technology and operation must be fully aligned with standard Bank-led model of financial inclusion
Provide technology and operation support to financial institutions so that service creation and delivery platform is unified from a Bank’s point of view
The platform must be open in technological perspective and licensing perspective
The platform will be based on the current state of the art technologies and architecture of what is considered advanced in top financial markets specifically Wall Street
The platform will be able to give its clients a single unified system for offering all of its services, products and channels to its end customers
Benefits for Banks
Celloscope’s Banking Platform helps banks increase service penetration, enhance customer loyalty and stickiness, reduce cost of operations and increase revenue. With mobile banking, banks can empower its customers (directly or through agents) to securely access their bank accounts using mobile phones to get information of their accounts like available balance, transactions summary etc. They can also make transactions in real time. Celloscope Banking platform facilitates banks to reach all potential customers, banked and unbanked across geographies in a very speedy and cost effective manner.
Celloscope Banking Platform incorporates input from bankers, technologists and end users. We, the organizations and people behind Celloscope, are very much aligned with the identification of bankers and regulators of Bangladesh that the current banking facilities coverage in Bangladesh is skewed in many senses – institutional banking covers only a meagre portion of people of Bangladesh and the platforms and technology that are being used in extending the coverage have inherent technological, economic and social limitations – they are fragmented, not optimized in the sense of cost in Bangladesh perspective and we do not own them or can control them.
Competitive Advantage
Celloscope Banking Platform certainly will give banks a competitive advantage over other banks offering same kind of services to their clientele. It will allow banks to come to market with new and enhanced banking services in a shorter time frame with a significant cost reduction. In terms of both time to market and delivery cost Celloscope Banking Platform has all the potential to be a game changer for banks.
Fast Implementation
We offer a very fast implementation option and methodology for Celloscope Banking Platform. This is important as it gives a clear advantage to banks as an early market entrant. For example, we offer an implementation window of as short as two weeks for services like bill collection and agent operation and less than a month for self-assisted banking channels implementation on Celloscope Banking Platform.
One Solution, Multiple Channels
Celloscope Banking Platform is not a single system for a single banking service, it is a platform for aggregating and delivering multiple banking services and channels under a single and unified technology platform. This means Celloscope banking Platform will enable banks to host and run a number of banking services on this platform like bill collection, remittance, agent services, card management etc.
Local In-Country Support
Celloscope Banking Platform is a joint development between Bangladesh, USA and Canada and wholly owned by Celloscope at source code level. The whole support and development team is Dhaka based. This means there is no dependency on any outside party which may delay and even make modifications and customization impossible. The full support comes from Bangladesh while the core platform is continuously enhanced in USA and Canada as well as in Bangladesh.
Proven Top of the Line Technology
Celloscope Banking Platform runs on Java and River real time event processing engine which was developed for building high performance business transaction and event processing system for financial, advertisement and telecom sector. The core engine is used in systems such as algorithmic trading and order management in hedge funds, in real time ad bidding engines and Telco grade applications for post and pre-paid billing systems.
The platform has been tested in production systems in financial, ad and telecom sector in US and Bangladesh market for a number of years. To give an idea about the performance and resilience of the core engine of Celloscope Banking Platform it can be mentioned that it reportedly is handling over a 400,000 events/transaction per minute in production without a single shutdown over the last two years in a certain telecom operation in Bangladesh.
Regulatory Compliance
Celloscope Banking Platform has been designed and developed with regulatory requirement in architecture. For example it has a separate layer for business rules processing and another separate layer for central bank guideline compliance. On top of that the platform supports all relevant central bank guideline for mobile financial inclusion services and agent banking. As soon as Bangladesh Bank updates its guidelines on areas where the platform works on, our development team immediately updates the core platform for clients as per licensing contracts.
Faster Change Management
Any banking system is a live, evolving system. This is even more evident in this time of rapid technology progression. Celloscope Banking Platform is architecturally suited for evolution and rapid integration of changes in banking processes, rules, channels as it has a very modular and pluggable component architecture. On top of that the whole support and development is done locally in Bangladesh which makes the change adoption as fast as possible.
Long Term Partnership
Celloscope believes that banking and financial systems are here to be used and evolved for a very long time in order of decades. These systems are not one shot system for solving temporal problems or short-time needs. Adoption and use of such platforms as Celloscope Banking Platform requires that client Bank and Celloscope forms a long time partnership with clear product road map and service level agreement. Celloscope is committed to long term partnership and support services with its clients.
Solutions -> Functional Features
Celloscope Banking Platform is a feature rich software application. The features are designed in such a way they can be easily modified according to specific customer need. Standard features include multiple channel support, customer information management, and financial product management among others.
Versatile Delivery Channel Support
In a bid to drive greater differentiation from the competition, optimize services and minimize costs, banks are exploring alternative banking channels that are right for their customers. It is important that the bank address each group of customers with the channel they require and then actively bring these alternatives to those customers. This requires a system that supports the bank handling its various channels reliably, securely and as simply as possible.
Comprehensive Customer Information Management
KYC per Bangladesh Bank regulation
Customer photograph for customer verification for every transaction
Signature scan and verification option for transactions
Identity management
Authentication credential
Biometric: 1 to 10 fingerprints enrolment per customer
Supports multiple authentication medium for customers (a customer can be enrolled in biometric, chip and pin, magnetic strip and signature, QR code, image, pin, one time pin by SMS, image password… any combination)
Two factor authentication
Rule based transaction profiling
Financial Product Management
Business Process Enforcement Support
Maker Checker support
Role based authority
Approval and process segregation
Business Rule Processor
Transaction rules
Limits
Interest calculation
Fees and charges
Penalties
Alerts
General Ledger Accounting
GAAP compliant accounting system
Double entry based general ledger
Real-time transaction update in general ledger
Security and Access Management
Role based access control
Two factor authentication
Supports authentication combination of any of the following
Transaction profiling and restriction based on Geo-location
Reporting
Client reporting (statements)
Internal reporting
MIS (BI) reporting (Analytic Processing)
Regulatory reporting
Exception reporting
Card Management
Issue new cards
Issue lost or stolen cards
Multi Language Support
Bangla Support
Solutions ->Third Party Integration Options
Celloscope Banking Platform can be integrated with existing systems used by Banks. For instance, the existing Core Banking System (CBS) which is responsible for central transaction and data management can be integrated with Celloscope platform through Application Programming Interface (API) provided by CBS vendor. Similarly, Card Management System (CMS) used by Banks can also be integrated with Celloscope platform to enable debit card as a payment channel through Celloscope’s mobile platform.
Solutions ->Technical Features
Celloscope Banking Platform is created of various tried and tested technological tools, languages, frameworks and engines. It can be ported to various Database engines. The GUI is optimized for smart phones, tablets and desktop. High degree of security has been achieved through encryption and multilevel authentication.
Solutions -> A few real life solutions
The type of real life need that can be addressed through Celloscope platform is endless. Bill Collection, Fee payment, salary disbursement, Social Safety Network payment etc. are just a few to name. The platform can be customized for any payment conceivable.
Bill Collection
Bill collection process in Celloscope platform is initiated through its mobile user interface which includes a “Bill Pay” top menu which will allow customers to make payments through agents from any location. Through “Create Template – Utility”, Banks can include any organization for which it may opt to collect bills.
Fee Collection
Celloscope Banking Platform can be used for all kinds of Fee Collection including Passport fee collection, BRTA fee collection etc. For example for passport fee collection the workflow could be as follows.
Agent Sign-in
Anyone (bank account holders and non-account holders) could come to agent location for Services like Passport fee deposit, reprint of barcode (if it is lost) etc.
Fee Deposit Options
Passport fee can have regular or express option having different fee structure. The agent can fill in a simple form with minimum input on behalf of the applicant.
Confirmation
Once everything is done the agent makes certain that everything is correct and gets it verified by the applicant for conformation.
Timeline
2009-2010
The story behind CELLOSCOPE started long before the company was formally launched. The six individuals behind CELLOSCOPE, located dispersedlyaround the globe had exchanged ideas and thoughts for many months waiting all along for the time when they all would meet to discuss things in person.
2011-2012
Around two years back, they got that much awaited opportunity to meet in Dhaka to discuss their plans. As usual, they started off with common topics like growing old,getting bored, missing Dhaka, and of course they all laughed out loud over memories of funny old stories. As conversation floated about on that afternoon, before long, it led to exploring possibilities of putting together their collective knowledge to address common needs in Bangladesh and beyond.
2013
With degrees in engineering and having spent most of their professional years in and around technologies, they can easily be labeled as an assembly of typical nerdsand geeks. Surprisingly, this crowd does not fall into that stereotyped category; they still listen to their music, search the night sky for falling stars, and read their fictions.This attribute, above all, gives them the edge over their competitors. They can think outside the realm of technology and relate easily to the need of their clients. This quality coupled with their command over technology gives CELLOSCOPE its unique flavor.
2014-2015
On an individual level, the ideas and expertise they possess were varied, and seemed apparently incoherent. In a nutshell they are:
• Hafiz's company in New York builds complex backend software for Wall Street firms.
• Rusho's company in Dhaka creates feature-rich Android based applications for clients in US.
• Asif's people build sophisticated banking and telecom software for large corporations, here and abroad.
• Rasul is ready to roll up his sleeves once again to deploy his army of agents as he had done earlier in his career.
• Shabbir, the financial wizard among the crowd, is excited about the prospect of growth for the new company.
• Rubayat is full of claims that agent banking can trigger a paradigm shift in the lives of average people in Bangladesh.
Everyone in that meeting put forth some unique proposition, propositions that could complement each other towards achieving a common goal.
At the end, they all wandered: why not put it all under one roof? And, that is exactly what they did. CELLOSCOPE, the company, came into being on that summer afternoon; a company where people with a zealto utilize technology to solve real life issues joined hands.
Be Part
Of Our
Story!
Our Team
People behind Celloscope
Celloscope Banking Platform is a result of many months’ effort of many people from various disciplines – bankers, technologists, operation managers, information security experts all of them. The platform has been possible through design, development and operation experience from some resource persons in the field of banking, technology and field level operation management.
Asif Yusuf
Mr. Yusuf has been a leading technology manager and team leader for over 12 years successfully starting a number of information technology companies in Bangladesh and elevating them to top flight positions in the industry. As a very successful entrepreneur, he has been playing the Chief Executive role of Celloscope from the very first day of its journey and matured Celloscope’s flagship product Celloscope Banking Platform to its current state.
Asif Hasan
Mr. Hasan has been an accomplished software architect, designer and developmentteam lead with a career spanning over 18 years. His long track record in designing a number of financial transaction and data management system in a number of banking and non-banking financial institutions in Bangladesh and North America, including Islami Bank Bangladesh Limited, Investment Corporation of Bangladesh, ASA, Standard Chartered Bank and CIBC , has been a valuable addition into Celloscope’s Banking Platform.
Ahmad Rasul
Mr. Rasul has been in product distribution and sales channel development and management for over 15 years in a number of multinational and local corporates operating all over Bangladesh. His operational experience and insight has been a key influence on designing Celloscope’s field delivery and operational monitoring, management and analytics components.
Ahmed Hafiz
Mr. Hafiz has been in high performance financial transaction system design and development in Wall Street for last 14 years. He was the product development head for automated algorithmic trading platform in Deutsche Bank, the system which trades billions of dollars a day in major exchanges like NYSE, NASDAQ, LSE, NIKKEI. Later he built such sensitive high performance trading and financial systems for JP Morgan and Bridge Waters, the largest hedge fund in the world now. He later worked in AppNexus, the 2nd largest ad exchange after Google for their real time ad bidding and serving system. His expertise in developing such top of the line systems has been the core in architecting and designing Celloscope’s main platform.
Shabbir Mubin
Details about him coming soon.
Companies behind Celloscope
As is evident, extending banking facilities to all corners of a population is a problem that cannot be solved by only one discipline; it requires bankers, technologists, distribution management specialists with proven track record who will work together and solve the problem in a cross discipline fashion. Celloscope’s formation took the same ideal path and people from a number of business entities from North America and Bangladesh joined together to form Celloscope. TheCelloscope team come from the following business entities :
Adaptive Enterprise Ltd.
A Dhaka, Bangladesh based leading Information Technology Company established in 2005 with specialization in mobile application technology and user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design and consulting. AEL bought forth the expertise behind the elegance and simplicity of Celloscope’s end-user device and application user experience.
Distributed Intelligence Inc.
A New York, USA based software technology platform provider established in 2011 by lead architects and product designers for intelligent automated trading systems in Wall Street. DI builds soft real time event processing and analysis engine for hedge funds, ad network and telecom clients in USA and outside of USA. DI is the key force behind the high performance, scalable and top of the line architecture and core software framework of Celloscope’s banking platform.
Doer Ltd.
A Dhaka, Bangladesh based distribution network and agent Management Company established in 2012 by professionals with long track record of pushing and distributing services to the doorsteps of people all across Bangladesh. Doer comes with the enabler role so that the reach of Celloscope’s technology platform extends to people everywhere.
Spectrum Engineering Consortium Ltd.
A Dhaka, Bangladesh based Information Technology Company established in 1995. SECL is one of the very few select companies of Bangladesh with a dexterous expertise both in software services (design, development, implementation and service) and infrastructure services (data networks, telecom networks, data centres and managed services). With its long track record in Bangladesh and outside - a significant portion of that being in financial sector - SECL brings in the service delivery capability for Celloscope.
